Problem with Windows environment

[martinholmer]

A new Windows user followed the getting started directions in this document, but could not pass all the unit tests because the mock package had not been installed. Here is the the error message:

================================== FAILURES ===================================
_____________________________ test_force_no_numba _____________________________

    def test_force_no_numba():
        """
        Force execution of code for non-existence of Numba
        """
        global Magic_calc6

        # Mock the numba module
>       from mock import Mock
E       ImportError: No module named mock

taxcalc\tests\test_decorators.py:296: ImportError

@PeterDSteinberg, Can you explain why this happened on Windows? Would the same thing happen to a new Mac users or a new Linux user? What files control the addition of packages needed by Tax-Calculator but not in the standard Anaconda Python distribution?

[MattHJensen]

On #1172 I asked:

Salim, did anything happen when you did activate taxcalc-dev? I don't see taxcalc-dev prepended to your system command prompt, so I'm wondering if that step didn't work.

To which Salim replied:

No, I never get any response when I run 'activate taxcalc-dev' - I didn't know I was supposed to.

[martinholmer]

@MattHJensen said:

On #1172 I asked:

Salim, did anything happen when you did activate taxcalc-dev? I don't see taxcalc-dev prepended to your system command prompt, so I'm wondering if that step didn't work.
To which Salim replied:

No, I never get any response when I run activate taxcalc-dev -- I didn't know I was supposed to.

I don't know what is supposed to happen either. What is supposed to happen? If there should be some kind of message, then does the lack of a message mean that the environment is not being activated?

That seems unlikely because all the other packages needed by Tax-Calculator were installed on his computer. It was only the mock package that was missing.

Where is the documentation about how all this Conda environment magic is supposed to work?

[PeterDSteinberg]

See PR #1180 for a fix. In the meantime conda install mock should install the necessary package.